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Spinoza, but without skipping demonstrations

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In February 2025, I devoted my spiritual life to an experiment that was long overdue: reading the Ethics of Spinoza without skipping its very dry & demanding demonstrations. I call it overdue because, for years, I have tried to internalize Spinoza’s philosophy, and finally, my experiment of March 2024 with “spinozist mindfulness” forced me to confront the fact that this could not be done fully without actually taking the plunge into spinozist logic. This new experiment gave me a new fervent appreciation of the paradigmatic spinozist philosophical exercise: reasoning in geometrical order. Last time I talked about practising Spinoza’s philosophy on this blog, I was trying to figure out what the paradigmatic spinozist philosophical exercise would be, and if it could be a form of mindfulness meditation . This reflection culminated in the following conclusion/confession: the “geometrical order” that Spinoza claims as a method, and which consists ...
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Fighting anxiety like my life depends on it

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TLDR: The struggle is real. In January 2025, during a vacation from work, I focused on a few philosophical exercises that decreased my anxiety to an astonishing degree. I recommend them wholeheartedly. However, in spite of keeping up those habits in February, going back to work immediately re-ignited my bad anxious habits… I would say to an equally astonishing degree! This forced me to wonder why these philosophical exercises did not rescue me in this new context and to reckon with the depth of my anxiety disorder – its intensity, pervasiveness, and origin. I share all the philosophical insights I can muster. Anxiety is what happens when you sense that you are in a situation of “problematic uncertainty” 1 . You feel that you lack information in a way that leaves you vulnerable to a potential threat. The French have this wonderful idiom that literally translate as “I do not know what sauce I am going to be eaten with” 2 . It means that we do not know what to expect exactly (though ...
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2025 New Year’s resolutions: Back to Mindfulness, the ‘Time Since’ method, and neglecting OCD rituals

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I have decided on my New Year’s resolutions for 2025 and I thought I would share them with you since, in case you haven’t noticed, this philosophy blog is a lifestyle blog. These resolutions are just as much philosophical experimentations as the other practices I talk about here, so I think it might interest you. First, Some Good Advice I’ve Heard      A good piece of advice I have heard about New Year’s resolutions is that it is more effective to have one resolution per month instead of resolutions for the whole year. Unfortunately for me, I cannot follow this advice, because I am already busy dedicating every month to a new philosophical exercise for the grand experiment that is this blog. That said… I suppose that another way of thinking about it is that I am already following that advice very well! And this one-practice-per-month method really worked for me in 2024! So I am both eager to do more, and wo...
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